blog post

Tuesday 4/16/13 03:30 12 44.617 S 123 47.188 W http://maps.google.com/?z=7&t=k&q=loc:12 44.617S 123 47.188W Bad Day Yesterday was a very bad day to say the least. It all started with a very hard night, with winds blowing up to twenty knots and fairly large waves that would kick the stern of the boat around. So when I went off watch at six am I was pretty tired. I was awaked a half hour later when a large gust hit and rounded the boat up into the wind and the boat was suddenly heeling thirty five degrees. Not a good thing when flying the spinnaker! Barb had it all under control but I was awake and ended up sitting in the cockpit for another hour. I then went to bed again and Barb woke me two hours later saying the wind had built even more, so I got up and we ended up taking the spinnaker down in the dark and putting the large jib, 160, out with the pole extended. Then it was back to bed. Two hours after that I woke to the boat rolling back and forth, basically rolling in the swells. The wind had gone down to five knots again. So it was time to take down the 160 and put the spinnaker back up. While rerouting the lines I noticed that one leg of the bow pulpit was broken, great one more thing to fix. Then when we hoisted the spinnaker it proceeded to just come falling out of the sock and ended up in the water dragging alongside the boat. That let the sock go free and it took off flying free about twenty feet from the boat. So I had to lower the sock down into the water and turn the boat into the wind so Barb could catch the sock and drag it onto the boat. Apparently when the sail people installed the spinnaker into the sock they did not tie off the pin in the swivel and over time and use the pin fell off. So I dug around and found a different pin and put it all together. Then we had to try and reload a very heavy wet spinnaker into a very wet sock which took a while. Then I hoisted the spinnaker again and just when I got it up the sock zoomed up to the top taking the hoisting line with it. Now it is swinging fifteen feet off the deck. Luckily I was able to snag it with the boat hook and pull it down before it wrapped itself around something else. By this time I had had it. I came back to the cockpit and plopped down and declared ‘that is it I am done I am not having a good time and I just want to go home!’ Actually it was much stronger then that but you get the idea, I was just finished! After I calmed down and had a great breakfast, of fish tacos, I just went to bed and slept for five hours. When I woke up I was feeling much better and not so depressed. I would never have believed just how hard on things this constant rocking and rolling is. The amount of work that is going to have to be done when I get to New Zealand is growing every day. It is very hard for me to watch as the boat is slowly taking such a beating. Not that the weather we are in is bad at all it is just the constant movement. But here I sit in the middle of the night with the sky lit up with a billion stars and warm glow of the phosphorescent water and I feel so lucky to be here!